Thursday, April 12, 2012

How much time should you invest in your corporate blog?

Tons. Seriously. You should make it your top priority.

I know this sounds downright crazy, but it actually works pretty well in the B2B marketing world, largely because so many companies are investing heavily in content already. In reality, you’re not investing more – rather, you’re just shifting how you produce it. Corporate blogging becomes the centerpiece of your thought leadership marketing efforts.

Most B2B companies produce white papers, reports briefings … whatever you want to call those PDFs that range from two to 100 pages and deal with one or a series of issues in the marketplace. The problem with this approach is that these white papers are time-consuming and expensive to produce, and the promotional value (not counting long-tail) is concentrated around the time of the release. You get one press release, one big rush to download the white paper – generally one bite at the apple.

So, what are you missing?

Well, there are interim benefits you could derive from the content used to create a mammoth document. If a white paper has several sections, you could release each section individually on a corporate blog and get roughly the same concentration of value described above for each installment. Basically, by taking the “big document” approach, you could be leaving 80 percent of its value on the table.

With a corporate blog, the dynamic is fundamentally different. Think of everything in the white paper as information (which shouldn’t be a stretch, because that’s exactly what it is). This information can be parceled out on a corporate blog, making it easier to reach your existing audience, attract new visitors from your target market and generate some sales and marketing intelligence through your web analytics. You’re still producing the same content, you’re just publishing it to your blog rather than assembling it into a big, expensive PDF. Ultimately, you get 5X the benefit for a much lower cost – and that doesn’t count any new readers you get through promoting the content to net-new readers through social media, SEO and so on.

When it comes to deciding how much time to invest in your corporate blog, start with your existing thought leadership/publications operation. Retool it to push content through a corporate blog rather than your existing channels. Your net investment shouldn’t change, and it will be substantial. How you execute, however, will be much different